


Part 2: Frances

by oiuytrewq36



Series: We Will Survive [2]
Category: Queer as Folk (US)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-16
Updated: 2020-08-16
Packaged: 2021-03-06 07:07:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,612
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25939384
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oiuytrewq36/pseuds/oiuytrewq36
Summary: When I first met Justin, I was worried we wouldn’t get along, because, let’s face it, he looks like the human equivalent of a warm and fuzzy feeling and I look like a punk vampire who works in IT. That was before I discovered that Justin is in fact very sneaky and also kind of a dick, two of my favorite qualities in a roommate - no, seriously.
Relationships: Brian Kinney/Justin Taylor (Queer as Folk)
Series: We Will Survive [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1881736
Comments: 9
Kudos: 59





	Part 2: Frances

**Author's Note:**

> I don't intend to create many original characters for this series, but I really wanted to play around with who Daphne's mysterious friend with an apartment in New York might be.

When Daphne called and said that her best friend was moving to New York and needed a place to live and hadn’t I been trying to rent out my spare room?, I couldn’t really say no - Daph had saved my ass more than once during my brief stint in Pittsburgh, and all in all, I really _had_ been planning on finding another roommate after the last one dropped out of grad school and ran away to become a busker in Paris. Also, friendship with Daphne was a much better qualifier for living with me than my previous metric, which was “can pay rent and owns fewer than three gerbils” (long story).

Justin Taylor arrived on a Tuesday with a beat-up duffel bag and the look of confused awe that all small-towners have when they realize that they’re going to be Living in the Big City. I don’t know what I was expecting - Daphne had told me that he was an artist and they’d known each other forever, and that was about it - but it definitely wasn’t a short blond WASP with an attitude and terrible taste in music.

When I first met Justin, I was worried we wouldn’t get along, because, let’s face it, he looks like the human equivalent of a warm and fuzzy feeling and I look like a punk vampire who works in IT. That was before I discovered that Justin is in fact very sneaky and also kind of a dick, two of my favorite qualities in a roommate - no, seriously. Sneakiness is a difficult quality to master (I assume it helps if you’re 22 and cute and look vaguely like a baby hedgehog, but I wouldn’t know) and I admire a person who knows how to run things behind the scenes. Also, people who are kind-of dicks are easier to live with than either people who are painfully nice - I really don’t need social guilt on top of my Catholic guilt - or people who are dicks all the time. You can yell at a person who is a dick some of the time when they’re being a dick, but you can also watch movies with them and show them cool hidden parts of the city and sometimes they cook for you, which you appreciate more than you maybe expected because you like cooking, but it’s also oddly nice to come home to awful European EDM blasting and your paint-splattered roommate making a mysterious soup that is actually very good.

So, anyway, Justin and I hit it off, and pretty soon I learned all about the life he’d left behind in Pittsburgh, with a sprawling family of people who’d taken care of him after he left home at seventeen - impossibly young, to me, who’d moved back in with my parents after college to save money while I built my resumé. He told me about his almost-husband, presumably the person responsible for the loud and frequent phone sex I could hear through my wall, and the diner where he’d worked before dropping out of school, and how he’d gone to Hollywood convinced he’d change the world, and one night when we were very drunk and he was trying to draw me and I asked him if he was okay when his hand started shaking, he told me about how he’d gone to his senior prom and danced with the man he’d later nearly marry and how afterward a classmate had hit him in the head with a baseball bat so hard that he didn’t wake up for two weeks. I didn’t know what to say to that, so I just moved over next to him, our shoulders touching, and we sat together until the sun came up.

It only took a week or so before I felt comfortable with him around - pretty good, for me, just so you know - and on his first weekend in New York, he took me to Stingray, a huge club with a cavernous dance floor and three tiers of balconies above it, and I started to get why he listened to techno. That was also the night I learned about his and Brian’s open relationship, in the form of me taking a wrong turn coming back from the bar, ending up in the club’s back room and walking in on Justin getting blown by a guy in a fuschia tank top. He laughed about it for a week. I told him to text me in advance if he was bringing a trick back to the apartment so I could charge my noise-cancelling headphones.

Brian appeared at seven p.m. on the fourth Thursday after Justin moved in. I was putting off some quarterly predictions in favor of debating whether I really _needed_ the new plum-toned holographic nail polish collection that my favorite indie brand had just released when he showed up at the apartment unannounced, tall and slim and staggeringly well-dressed. If we were straight, we’d make a lovely vampire power couple. 

When I opened the door, he did the thing that people do when they meet me for the first time, taking in the splatter of monochrome tattoos across my collarbone, the fourteen piercings, the glasses, the utilitarian-goth clothes. To his credit, he made eye contact afterwards - never trust a man who won’t look at you - and said, “Is Justin here?”

Justin was out looking at a studio space that one of the other cashiers at the café had told him about. I explained this, then said, “You’re Brian, right? He should be back in half an hour.”

He nodded.

“I’m Frances.”

“Ah. The analyst,” he said, looking violently uninterested. Weirdly, I liked him immediately, but I guess that’s not surprising given my views on part-time assholes.

“Want to come in?”

He didn’t say anything, just swept past me into the apartment. I followed him in and closed the door.

“Can I get you anything?” I said, and he looked at me as if I’d grown a second head. “We have water, Coke, beer, gin-”

“Gin and tonic? Easy on the ice.”

“Sure, lemon or lime?”

Three minutes later, I stood by the fridge, awkwardly rearranging the Magnetic Poetry while he circulated around the apartment with a G&T with lemon in hand. I retrieved my half-finished sangria-in-a-bottle from next to my laptop and watched him poke around. When he ran out of things to look at, which didn’t take very long, he went over to the window and looked down at the street outside. He kept stealing curious glances at me that I think he thought I didn’t notice. I waited for him to talk.

“I didn’t realize that Goldman Sachs would hire someone with that much metal in their face,” he said finally, turning a little towards me with one eyebrow slightly raised.

I ran a finger fondly over the spider-bite piercing in the lower right corner of my mouth. “Goldman Sachs is for power-hungry douchebags who want to play real-life Monopoly. I’m a cosmetics industry specialist at a boutique firm on Madison Avenue.”

Brian did a strange slow nod. I was starting to understand why Justin had left him twice before they managed to figure out their communication issues. 

“You run an ad agency, right? Kinnetik?”

He laughed, a weird sharp bark that didn’t convey any emotion. “You’ve done your research.”

I shrugged. “Force of habit. Most of the new people I meet are clients, so I have a patented high-efficiency background research process.”

He turned around to face me head-on with an expression that could have been construed as non-antagonistic. “I just tell my assistant to do it for me.”

“Must be nice to be the top of the food chain,” I said, and he leaned against the windowsill, his not-smile widening a little.

“You bet.”

We talked shop for a little while after that - we’d shared a few clients, as it turned out, and had had to deal with some of the same pain-in-the-ass representatives. Twenty minutes later, we’d settled into the not-uncompanionable silence that can only exist between two antisocial queer Irish ex-Catholic businesspeople with a reasonable level of respect for each other’s talent.

When the key jiggled in the lock, Brian jumped to his feet with an expression on his face that made me question everything I thought I'd learned about him since he arrived. Then Justin came through the door and stopped dead, staring at him.

Brian set down his drink. “Hey, Sunshine,” he said, and Justin ( _Sunshine?_ Seriously, Taylor?) flung himself halfway across the room into his arms, and then they were kissing madly, the kind of kissing I imagine happens in the middle of good sex, for people who partake in that sort of thing. I’m going to say that they made out in the middle of my living room for at least six full minutes - I didn’t actually time them, but I was sorely tempted - before they broke apart, just a little, foreheads pressed together.

“I thought you couldn’t make it up here until Saturday,” Justin murmured.

Brian nuzzled into his hair. “Pegasus cancelled last-minute. No Friday client dinners for me this week.”

Justin turned his head, maybe to give Brian better access to his neck, and noticed me. He blushed. Unnecessary, really, since by now I’d walked in on him having various kinds of sex at least four times, but I appreciated the sentiment.

“Frances, I guess you’ve met-”

“Your lovely roommate entertained me while we were waiting,” Brian said, one hand creeping up under the hem of Justin’s FCUK NORMAL T-shirt. “As always, Daphne has excellent taste,” he added, turning to look at me with another not-smile. I smiled back.


End file.
